A seal blubber-stained copy of David Copperfield which survived Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s 1910 expedition to Antarctica and a draft of Charles Dickens’s public letter announcing his separation from his wife will form part of an exhibition marking the centenary of the opening of the writer’s former London house as a museum.
Hundreds crammed inside the Georgian terrace in Bloomsbury in 1925, spilling on to the pavement, as 48 Doughty Street was saved from demolition 55 years after the death of its most famous resident.
“I cannot help thinking that he would have cherished the knowledge … that the house which he first rented in London, and to which he brought his young wife, the house in which Oliver Twist and Wackford Squeers and Kate Nickleby were all born, was for all time to be made available to the admirers of his genius,” Lord Birkenhead told the crowds at its official opening as a museum.
A century later at the Charles Dickens Museum, the family home where Dickens wrote The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby, a new centenary exhibition will showcase its collections, with some items seen for the first time.
These include a chalk and pastel sketch of Dickens believed to be an original drawing for the “lost” third portrait of Dickens by Samuel Laurence, which either no longer survivesor its whereabouts are unknown.
The stained copy of David Copperfield was taken to Antarctica on the Terra Nova. Stranded in an ice cave, the crew read a chapter every night for 60 nights; the book was left blackened by fingerprints, likely due to the seal-blubber fire.
“It’s such a microcosm of history, really,” said the exhibition’s curator, Emma Harper. “I think the fact that [the explorers] choose to take a work of Dickens with them, in 1910, 40 years after Dickens died, shows already his legacy is such that is the text they take with them to keep them entertained on this voyage.”
A direct link to an infamous moment in Dickens’s life is a draft letter he wrote to the family servant, Ann Brown. It contains the first paragraphs of the “Violated Letter”, in which Dickens forcefully and very publicly exposed the collapse of his marriage.
“Basically in 1858, Charles Dickens separated from his wife, Catherine. He did this in a very public way by publishing it in his journal, Household Words, telling the world about his separation,” said Harper.
“Even at the time it was a bit of a controversial move. He was really one of the first celebrities, and he was anxious to maintain early PR, to ‘control the story’, I guess we would say in today’s speak.”
Previously unseen manuscripts – including an extract from The Old Curiosity Shop on the death of Little Nell – will be shown, as well as a rare example of some of the earliest pieces of writing by Dickens as a teenage suitor to his first crush, Maria Beadnell.
His early love poetry was kept by Beadnell. “Some of it is OK. Some of it is quite bad,” said Harper. “I find it quite amusing that it is basically a teenage young man writing poetry for his crush. You wouldn’t necessarily recognise it as from the genius of Victorian writing.”
Dickens in Doughty Street: 100 Years of the Charles Dickens Museum runs from 5 February to 29 June 2025
